Part 1: Deceiving Children about God

An atheistic mom from Texas explains why she doesn’t raise her children with God and attacks God by pushing er religion on CNN. Her verbal attacks on God and Christianity warranted a response.

An atheistic mom from Texas explains why she doesn’t raise her children with God and attacks God by pushing her religion on CNN. Her verbal attacks on God and Christianity, and their apparent acceptance by CNN staff, warranted a response.

My hope is that this rebuttal of her position will allow her to rethink her false presuppositions and reconsider the God of the Bible before she deceives her kids any further. This educational response is presented with kindness and sincerity, but also with boldness to teach people to be discerning on this subject.

Why I Raise My Children Without God

When my son was around 3 years old, he used to ask me a lot of questions about heaven. Where is it? How do people walk without a body? How will I find you? You know the questions that kids ask.

For over a year, I lied to him and made up stories that I didn’t believe about heaven.

This is part of the problem. Why not trust what God says in His Word about heaven, new bodies, and so on, instead of entering the realm of lying to kids by making up stories and presenting them as fact.

Like most parents, I love my child so much that I didn’t want him to be scared.

But why would an atheist, value love, which is a Christian principle? True love comes from God because God is love (1 John 4:8), so a blatant denial of Him leads to the conclusion that one cannot believe in love either.

Consistent atheists realize this. They commonly teach that love is just a chemical reaction in the brain that is no different from hate, sadness, fear (being scared), hope, and so on. They are just meaningless aspects of a meaningless existence that may or may not have a survival advantage.

I wanted him to feel safe and loved and full of hope.

But why, as an atheist? Who cares if children feel fear, are hated, and have no hope in an atheistic worldview? In a world where here is no God who sets what is right and wrong, how can anyone say such things would be wrong?

Also, note the hypocrisy. If one wants a world that is safe from sinners, full of love and hope, then why deny God who is the answer to all of life’s struggles?

But the trade-off was that I would have to make stuff up, and I would have to brainwash him into believing stories that didn’t make sense, stories that I didn’t believe either.

The easy solution to this problem is to tell the truth of God’s Word instead of making up lies to tell children. Atheists, who obviously deny the 10 commandments, do not view lies as wrong per se. The only solid basis for calling it wrong to lie to a child is by a biblical standard. All unbelievers must borrow from the truth of the Bible for morality, which is the ultimate standard of morality.

One day he would know this, and he would not trust my judgment.

First, what makes an atheist think that “trust” should be valued? Trust is not material but abstract; it has no mass and cannot be measured, so why would an atheist say such a thing even exists based on his or her own materialistic worldview?1
Materialists who deny absolute morals but still value trust are borrowing from Christian theism.

Second, I hope by the grace of the Holy Spirit that children will see through the false evolutionary fairy tales that are commonly taught to them. They are simply rehashes of old, falsified worldviews anyway—like Epicureanism (a Greek mythology) and Lamarckianism (giraffe-neck-stretching evolution).

He would know that I built an elaborate tale

And will continue to do so as long as one remains an atheist and continues to build an elaborate tale—just an ungodly one.

—not unlike the one we tell children about Santa—

Parents shouldn’t lie to their kids about the Santa fairy tale any more than they should lie to their kids about evolutionary fairy tales. A lie is a lie and “no lie is of the truth” (1 John 2:21)—even Christians inconsistently lie because we are all sinners. If someone wants to teach the truth about a real person named St. Nicholas, then so be it; but I suggest people drop the falsities about an imaginary person from the North Pole in a red outfit.

to explain the inconsistent and illogical legend of God.

That is very Christian of you to oppose inconsistent and illogical arguments. By what standard can the atheist judge something to be inconsistent and illogical? One would have to have all knowledge.

In an atheistic worldview, what’s wrong with being illogical and inconsistent, especially if it serves a survival purpose? In contrast, God is the standard of logic and reasoning. It is illogical to believe in logic and not believe in God. Many atheists appeal to logic, but they have to borrow from the Bible to even agree that a standard of logic exists.

The laws of logic are not material entities. Therefore, atheists, who are materialists because of their godless worldview, must deny any absolute logic and reasoning but appeal to it as material and subjective like chemical reactions. But they are inconsistent when they agree logic exists, especially as an absolute standard. In other words, atheism is self-refuting.

It is by God alone that logic and reasoning exist and that we can even comprehend such things, since we are made in the image of an all-knowing, logical, and consistent God. The Bible even gives the basis for why some people do not think logically, and that goes back to sin and the Curse in Genesis 3.

And so I thought it was only right to be honest with my children.

What makes the atheist think “right” and “wrong” exist? That is very Christian to think in such a way. And why be honest? These are Christian values. The atheist must appeal to survival advantages and random chemical reactions in the brain, not right and wrong, if they wish to be consistent with their professed worldview.

I am a non-believer, and for years I’ve been on the fringe in my community. As a blogger, though, I’ve found that there are many other parents out there like me.

But atheists are believers, just in a false religion (i.e., the various forms of humanism).

We are creating the next generation of kids, and there is a wave of young agnostics, atheists, free thinkers and humanists rising up through the ranks

As I pointed out earlier, the blogger does indeed have a religion: atheistic humanism. And what she means by “lower our nation’s religious fever” is that she actually wants to replace Christianity with her own religious ideals.

Either you have been deceived into believing these false beliefs are not religions, or you are saying this to deceive the readers to mistakenly think they are not religious.

Here are a few of the reasons why I am raising my children without God.

God is a bad parent and role model.

If God is our father, then he is not a good parent. Good parents don’t allow their children to inflict harm on others.

How does an atheist define good and bad anyway? This is an arbitrary assertion that is a mere opinion, and thus it cannot stand as a logical argument and is therefore refuted. God in the flesh disagreed with you when He said, “No one is good but One, that is, God alone” (Mark 10:18). By God’s standard you are not good, nor is anyone else.

By asserting this statement that God is not a good parent because He allows His children to inflict harm on others, your parents must not have been good since they are allowing you to harm others with this anti-God, public blog post, teaching them harmful lies. Furthermore, you must not be a good parent either, since all children, including yours, can and will inflict harm on others—mentally or physically—at some point. Of course, all of these things are explained as a part of a sin-cursed world as described in Genesis 3.

But this misinformed idea of God, if taken to its conclusion, demands that God act to stop every person who would intend harm toward another person. This means you oppose both the freedom and love that God gave to Adam and Eve in the beginning. Would you really want to believe in God if He always acted to prevent people from doing wrong?

But let’s address the specific claim here. The root issue with this statement is that God is not everyone’s father. God created all in His image (Genesis 1:26), and He “sends rain on the just and on the unjust” as a father would provide for his children (Matthew 5:45
). However, unbelievers cannot call unto God as His children, but believers in Christ can “cry out, ‘Abba, Father’” (
Romans 8:15
). Unbelievers are called “children of the devil”
(1 John 3:10
). They are also called “children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3)
and “sons of disobedience”
(Colossians 3:6)
. The biggest scriptural problem with the statement “God is a bad parent” is that God is not the father of everyone but only those who are born again. Obviously, this goes back to the origin of sin in Genesis 3. Keep in mind that God is also a righteous judge, and those who are disobedient will receive their due (1 Peter 4:5).

Christians are not perfect either. We fall short everyday. The difference is that we are forgiven and saved; and invite others to be saved and forgiven as well in Jesus Christ. We strive to produce the fruits of the Holy Spirit. (See Beauty and the Curse and What Does It Mean to Be “Saved”?)

Good people don’t stand by and watch horrible acts committed against innocent men, women and children.

First, no one is innocent because “all have sinned” (Romans 3:23), and second, have you acted to oppose abortion, by which millions of children are killed every year in the name of freedom? And have you opposed the teaching of false, horrible worldviews like evolution, which can lead to kids viewing other kids as merely animals that can be killed like fruit flies?

In an atheistic worldview, why should you not commit horrible acts against men, women, and children—especially if it serves to preserve the strong as Charles Darwin supported. They are no different from the Streptococcus bacteria that people destroy with antibiotics.

The point here is that no one is innocent and all have failed to live up to God’s standard of good—the perfect obedience only accomplished by Jesus Christ. When you take away the meaning of sin, you destroy the message of the Cross—that Christ died for our sins and rose again the third day as the Scriptures prophesy.

“He has given us free will,” you say? Our children have free will, but we still step in and guide them.

Then how is it that many children grow up to oppose their parents’ views? It is time to get back to God’s view.

Footnotes

For the reader, atheists are materialists by their nature. They deny any immaterial/non-physical/spiritual realm. If they left open the possibility, then they could not be atheists, as they would have to leave open the possibility that God might exist.

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Answers in Genesis is an apologetics ministry, dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively. We focus on providing answers to questions about the Bible—particularly the book of Genesis—regarding key issues such as creation, evolution, science, and the age of the earth.